I came to Jacob Boehme the way many English readers have, through William Law. Law's Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life is a plain, severe, and beautiful book, and when I learned that its author had spent his last twenty years reading a German shoemaker, I went to find out why. That was a long time ago. I am still finding out.
The shoemaker
Boehme was born in 1575 in a village near Gorlitz, in Upper Lusatia, and herded cattle as a boy. He was apprenticed to a shoemaker, became a master of the trade in Gorlitz in 1599, married, and had four sons. In 1600, by the account of his first biographer, his eye fell on a pewter dish catching the sunlight, and in that moment he seemed to see into the inner nature of all things. He told no one. Ten years later the experience returned, and in 1612 he began to write it down, for himself, in a book he called Morgenrote im Aufgang, the dawn rising. His readers came to call it Aurora.
He did not mean to publish it. A nobleman borrowed the manuscript and had it copied, the copies circulated, and the chief pastor of Gorlitz denounced the author from the pulpit. The town council took the manuscript and ordered Boehme to stop writing. He obeyed for five years. Then, urged on by friends who had read the Aurora, he began again, and in the six years left to him he wrote some thirty works, among them The Three Principles of the Divine Essence, The Signature of All Things, and the Mysterium Magnum. Only one book, The Way to Christ, was printed in his lifetime, in 1624. It brought on a new attack. He traveled to Dresden to answer the charges, came home ill, and died in November of that year. His biographer reports that he asked his son whether he heard the beautiful music, and that his last words were, "Now I go hence into Paradise."
Why he is hard
Every reader of Boehme says that he is difficult, and every reader is right. It helps to know why.
- He wrote in German. In 1612 philosophy and theology were written in Latin. Boehme had no Latin, so he made a vocabulary out of the German he had, the Bible, and the alchemical and astrological pamphlets of his day. Salt, sulfur, and mercury, the planets, and the signs of the zodiac all appear in his pages as names for movements within God and the soul.
- He believed in a language of nature. Boehme held that the sounds of words, spoken in the mouth, reveal the essence of what they name. He sometimes explains a word by taking it apart syllable by syllable. The etymologies are wrong. They are not meant to be philology.
- He was describing a process, not a structure. His God is not a fixed being but a self-birth: out of the Ungrund, the groundless abyss without will or form, a desire arises to know itself, and through seven qualities, from a dark contraction and anguish to a flash of fire, and from fire to light, sound, and bodily form, the hidden God becomes manifest. Darkness and wrath are not outside God but are the first principle, which the second principle, love and light, overcomes. This was his answer to the question that had troubled him all his life: where evil comes from.
- He wrote fast and did not revise. The Aurora breaks off in the middle of its argument. Later works repeat earlier ones with new terms. Reading him is less like reading a system than like watching someone look at the same light from a dozen windows.
Where to begin
Do not begin with the Aurora. It is his first book and the closest to the original experience, and that is why it is the least organized. Begin instead with The Way to Christ, a set of short treatises on repentance, resignation, and the new birth, written for ordinary devout readers. The dialogue in it called Of the Supersensual Life, in which a disciple asks his master how he may come to see God, is ten pages long and as clear as anything in the literature of contemplation.
After that, try The Signature of All Things, on the outward marks by which every creature shows its inner nature. Then the Aurora, read slowly, a chapter at a sitting. Keep a list of his terms as you go, with the page where each first appears. You will find that they settle down.
Read him aloud if you can. He was not a scholar at a desk but a craftsman talking, and the rhythm carries meaning that the eye skips.
Boehme in English
English readers have been lucky. John Sparrow, a lawyer, and a few friends translated nearly all of Boehme between 1645 and 1662, in the English of the King James Bible and the seventeenth-century sermon. Their versions were reissued in four handsome volumes between 1764 and 1781, usually called the William Law edition, with the engraved figures of Dionysius Andreas Freher, whose paper flaps lift to show the layers of the soul and the worlds. Many readers still find Sparrow's English the best match for Boehme's German, archaic as it is.
Modern translations are easier going and often more accurate on particular points. Read one of each if you can, side by side. On how to judge a translation, see our essay Choosing a Translation.
His readers
Few authors have had such a varied company of readers. Within a generation of his death his books were being studied by Protestant mystics in Silesia, by Johann Georg Gichtel's circle in Amsterdam, and by English radicals and royalists alike during the Civil War. John Pordage and Jane Lead built their visionary theology upon him. William Law spent his last years with him. Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin learned German in middle age in order to read him and translated him into French.
The Romantics found him again. William Blake, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, set him above Swedenborg: "Any man of mechanical talents may from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg's." Coleridge acknowledged his debt. Hegel called him the first German philosopher, and Schelling built on his account of the dark ground in God. In the twentieth century Russian religious philosophers in exile made him their own.
On our shelves
Boehme stands at the North Gate in class D 4, with the Rosicrucian manifestos and his own followers, although he would be just as much at home among the contemplatives at the East Gate. We keep the seventeenth-century English translations in facsimile, the Law edition with Freher's figures in a modern reprint, several modern translations, and a shelf of studies. When I gave my own books to the East Gate, I kept back my Boehme for a year. Then I gave that too, on the condition that I could visit it.